The Good Doctor

The Good Doctor appeared and disappeared in my life over a period of several years. There was always some confusion about him and who he really was. He used to work in the same office as me – although ‘work’ is a bit of a stretch. He did not arrive at the office to do any work, he just chatted with folk for a while, then a secretary would hand him a brown envelope and he was gone. The brown envelopes appeared to bulge with banknotes. He dressed mainly in black. A large black duffel coat, black trousers and shoes. Usually one of those self-coloured textured shirts that tie up at the collar with a strip of leather. The Good Doctor invited me around to his home once, when he was living in Edinburgh. It was a basement apartment in the New Town. There were snacks and excellent wine to start. Food would arrive soon, he assured me. Meanwhile he chatted and we both drank quite a bit. The place was silent. No sound of a kitchen and food being prepared. Not even the smell of food. But eventually several plates, bowls and glorious food showed up. It was delivered by a small woman who did not speak. But there was an odd exchange of glances between the Good Doctor and the woman. I got the impression that a whole conversation had happened between them without a word being spoken. It was already dawn when I left. The Good Doctor was just about to begin work. It seemed that he stayed up for five or six days at a stretch and then fell asleep somewhere, perhaps in a chair, only to wake up a few hours later to begin all over again. Wine, food, work, brown envelopes, silent conversations with mysterious women. I don’t think he was even a real doctor. After knowing him a little while I kind of gave him the name of Doctor Haze. Somehow, it was all about the performance for him, not what one actually achieved in life. I thought it was a bit like Louis Armstrong – who, when asked about the meaning of his music, said, if you had to ask what jazz is then you’ll never know. That’s very much how it was with the Good Doctor. If we had to ask about what he meant by what he did, then we are just never going to get it. But, at least I hope, I can explain enough to give you some idea. Let me tell you a few stories to get us started, because story is partly what it’s about. My best memory is just a tiny incident. I had been in town for a show. The show had been disappointing, and I came outside into a rainy afternoon. The rain stopped suddenly and there was a beam of brilliant sunshine. I was waiting at a pedestrian crossing and a young woman showed up, pushing a bicycle. I smiled at her and she smiled back. There was just a tiny flicker at the end of the smile, as if she was expecting me to say something. But then the traffic lights changed and she got on her bike and rode away. I think I can die happy from just seeing that one smile. Then there was a friend who had been staying at a place in the Highlands of Scotland where you can go help plant trees to restore the ancient woodland that used to cover much of the country. The volunteers had a day off, and the leader of the organisation suggested they go for a walk. They’d not gone far when they reached a small shop. The leader, a Buddhist monk, bought several chocolate bars as sustenance for the walk ahead. But my friend was not wanting to eat chocolate. ‘This is what you’re missing’, the leader teased, munching on chocolate. ‘This is what you’re missing’. Half way into the walk, they reach a pub, nestled into the hills. The leader suggested they stop for a drink. But my friend is not for drinking. ‘This is what you’re missing. This is what you’re missing.’ Years later, my friend and I are invited to someone’s house for dinner. I have brought a bottle of wine. Our host puts it into a bedroom and then locks the bedroom door. She only has parsnips for the meal. She sets about peeling and then shredding the parsnips. Meanwhile I recount the story about the monk leader and the walk. My friend explains that I have almost every detail wrong. Apart from – some people went on a walk – it is all a complete fabrication. Yet I had been so sure that I’d remembered it just as I’d been told. Meanwhile, well, parsnips take a long time to shred! Our host, I remembered, had once visited the house where I’d lived with my elderly father for a few years. I recount the story of her strange arrival late one night in pouring rain. But, well, although some of this is true a lot of the details seem to be different. And finally, by way of introduction, one of the oddest moments. I was in my first apartment in Edinburgh and expecting someone to call about the tenancy of the property. There’s a knock at the door and I open it to find a woman standing at the doorstep. But at that very moment there is a crash as someone hits a bollard at the entrance to a pend right next to the house. And just at that very moment there is a loud shout from someone at the other end of the street. And just at that very moment a seagull flying overhead releases its sticky white cargo and this lands immediately between the woman and I, just missing us both. The woman looks at me in consternation. It seems that she thinks I’ve somehow staged this! I even start to explain: ‘Perhaps you think I staged this’, I say, lamely. ‘But really, how could I? The preparation. The training of the seagull.’ The woman is not amused. She concludes things about the apartment as quickly as possible and leaves, still angry. If only, I think, if only she could somehow have appreciated the beauty of that moment. Or then again, if only that seagull had better aim. Anyway, let’s park those strange stories there for a bit and we’ll return to them later. Meanwhile, back to the Good Doctor himself – Doctor Haze. It turned out he used to live in the village of Balmerino, on the estuary of the River Tay in Fife. Balmerino is a town I’d only visited once or twice as a teenager. There is an abbey there, strangely tiny in its proportions. A Spanish princess had travelled by ship from Spain to commemorate the founding of the abbey. When I was a teenager this was what fascinated me the most. And there were ancient wooden posts in the water where the harbour had been. The water just off the shingle beach had been very clear and deep. I returned, some years later. What remained of the harbour was gone. The water of the river was muddy. The ancient tree was to be replaced. I guess the new tree was not to be delivered by a princess crossing a thousand miles of ocean but by a council lorry from the nearby town of Glenrothes. I hoped that there would at least be a ceremony. Cars had invaded, whilst in the past everyone who drove parked higher up, not risking the steep descent down into the village. But hardy 4x4s could now manage the incline. But back then, well, it was the sort of place the Good Doctor would choose to live. He left his house in the New Town shortly after I’d got to know him. He drifted from place to place. There was mention of Plokton, on the West coast, and Hopeman, on the Moray coast, to the North. But often he was back in Edinburgh. He would go to a tiny shop, just off one of the main tourist streets of the city. The shop sold a strange assortment of items. Not ornaments or souvenirs but functional items such as compasses, microscopes and leather-bound notebooks. It was such a notebook that Doctor Haze would purchase at the shop. He’d tuck it into his coat and then retire to one of the nearby pubs. He’s sit in a corner, with his glass of beer, and begin to write. No pencil or biro for him. No, he preferred to write in real ink. And I don’t mean even a fountain pen. It was a dip pen, filled from the bottle every time he completed just a few letters of a single word. But, with time, a book would be completed. Doctor Haze would return to the shop, buy another book and start over again. Meanwhile, he would leave the completed book somewhere it would easily be discovered. So, what was he writing? Well, like I’ve said, to provide a complete explanation is sort of to assume that the message of the book will not be understood. But I can take you near. We might compare him, for instance, to the work of Aristotle, to Henri Bergson, to Husserl or even to Hegel. But then, perhaps that makes things more difficult rather than easier! In fact, I’ve heard it said that if you think you’re starting to understand Hegel then you’re either drunk or insane. So let me instead compare the work of Doctor Haze to some recent experiments in neuroscience. The first one starts well but gets a bit disturbing. There are mice, bred in captivity, and kept in cages as blank and featureless as possible. But the mice are in for happy lives nonetheless – albeit very short lives. Mice, whilst they will eat almost anything, are strangely not that fond of cheese. Their real passion lies more with peanut butter. So the mice are fed peanut butter and pretty much nothing else happens in their short lives. Then it’s over for the poor creatures. And, the really gruesome bit - their little brains are taken out and cut into very thin slices. Each slice is examined in intricate detail. So what are the scientists looking for? Well, I’ve simplified the experiment somewhat but essentially they look for some change in the structure of the brain, to indicate the pleasure the mouse has experienced in eating the peanut butter. Some physical trace, some record laid down in the brain cells to record what happened. And something along the same lines has happened recently. The brain of the tiny fruit fly contains only about 140,000 cells with around 50 million possible connections between cells. A perfect map has been created of the fruit fly brain. What to do with the map? Well, again, looking perhaps for how the fly records its experiences, how it remembers things. So perhaps the first thing to say about Doctor Haze is that, for him, life is about stories rather than about facts. There might well be a perfect map of a brain. There might even be a physical trace of a mental event, like peanut butter. Scientists may go on to create the most amazing human technologies as a result of this knowledge. But, as the Good Doctor would tell us, the map is not the territory. At best – and as in the case of the fruit fly – it is a perfect correspondence with reality. But the reality is very different. It is experienced. It is a poetic truth rather than an accountant’s truth. But, you may counter, there are maps everywhere and don’t they tell us a lot about what’s really there? I can have a paper map or a software map on a phone or a laptop and it can show me where I am exactly – the town, the street, the house. And I can check records and find whoever lives in each house, if I wanted. Yes, that’s all true. But again, the map is an abstraction, and not a lived, embodied experience. And if we think back to the stories that I related earlier, then it’s fair to say that some things are pure fantasy, but some things have a bedrock of truth below them. So we are not completely lost in narrative – it matters very much that we respect and search for truth – so far as that’s possible. But it’s story that grips us – that changes our lives – in fact it’s story that defines us. The male fruit fly sings to its mate. It sounds a bit like the purr of a contented cat. So, Doctor Haze would say, here is relationship and intention, agency, quality. We are starting to see Aristotle’s categories, we are starting to see Henri Bergson’s durée – that sense of time being dependant on our experience of it rather than our measure of it. There is not an abstract objective truth – rather there are relationships with a place, with other people and with other creatures. All ideas that the brain-slicers hate – or would at least like to reduce to some physical change in the world! So Doctor Haze had a very different view of how the world is constructed. A poetic truth, as I’ve suggested. I hesitate to use the word ‘enchanted’ however, or indeed ‘sacred’, and I’m not even too happy with ‘poetic’. Let’s just say it’s an experiential truth. And I hate to suggest that the brain-slicers try to put truth into a box, or that they aspire to some kind of transcendent truth in the laws of nature. Let’s just say, they are committed to an abstraction. The map, however literally accurate it might be drawn, is always an abstraction. So there it is, in plain terms – experiential truth or abstract truth. That’s the comparison the Good Doctor was trying to draw out. But there’s one problem – at least one – that needs a bit of explaining. Look back at the stories that started this essay. The smiling woman on the bicycle, the monk with his ‘this is what you’re missing’, the parsnip woman and her late night visit, the crash, the shout and the seagull and even the town of Balmerino. You’ll note that these are often false narratives and changing narratives. So does it all come down to stories? Was the Good Doctor saying that we are forever trapped in narrative? Well certainly, stories are very powerful. But there are factual stories and there are fantasies, and part of being a viable human being is about recognising the difference between the two. Nonetheless, we can play! Doctor Haze would often be laughing at life. My first memory was of lying in my cot. My mother had washed her hair and wrapped a towel around her head. She approached me with a huge white handkerchief and tried to get me to blow my nose. My most recent memory is of sipping some tea in the hut in my garden. My vision slides across the door in front of me and there is a drumming sound on the roof. I’d fallen asleep and awoken to heavy rain. That was two days ago. I have been keeping accountant’s time since then. Did I really exist between that memory and the last one? That experience and the last real experience? It’s difficult to say. I sort of existed and I sort of didn’t. There is only the experience, in a sense. I was not alive until I saw mother with the handkerchief. I have not been alive since I heard the rain drumming on the roof of the shed. Doctor Haze would have told us that we ask the wrong questions of the universe. Without experience there is no consciousness. Without consciousness there is no agency. Without agency, form (not a category for Aristotle) cannot emerge from formlessness. Without form there is no space and no relation. Yes, of course there is substance behind all this. But substance is an ephemeral thing – winking in and out of existence as it is brought to life by our actions in the world – then disappearing back into formlessness whilst it waits for a further encounter. Instead, we slice up brains and look for some substance there! But it’s only a living brain that can ‘make’ substance happen. And the substance is not there in the brain but outside in the world. So substances – or entities, as Doctor Haze preferred to call them – are in a kind of liminal state between existing in the physical world and resting in a kind of idealist world. There is not a person in a place, there is person-place. There is not the reader and the book, there is reader-book. There are not individual things, there is a multiple – as a thing in itself, as ‘number’. The state of an entity is about how it is experienced by a sentient creature – no sentience, no fixed state. And there, now we have covered all of Aristotle’s categories and I hope, got a flavour of what Doctor Haze had been trying to say. The categories are not just a list, they’re a living explanation of how the world functions. We just ask the wrong questions! The categories are not vague woolly words, they are as concise as any science. This is as far as I can take you, without you reading Doctor Haze yourself. But perhaps you’re thinking, if he felt his message was important then why did he scratch it out by hand over and over with a dip pen and a bottle of ink? Could he not at least have made photocopies? Or how about typing and print-on-demand books? He could have reached thousands, instead of making just a handful of leather-bound notebooks. But that’s not the way he would have seen it. Perhaps one day you’ll be browsing in a charity shop in Edinburgh’s Stockbridge, or Morningside, or Newington. And there you’ll come across a leather bound book, with a strap around it and a curved brass hook to fasten it. There’s a price on the book, but you recognise that it is not really a thing – it’s an entire conversation, a whole relationship, just between you and the Good Doctor. What you’ve found is priceless. Opening the book and reading it for the first time, you may have no need of further questions. The very experience has demonstrated the meaning that Doctor Haze wanted to convey.